done in by greg's

first things first - here is that hilarious series of pics from sunday.

picture #1 (deemed unacceptable because me and dr. rei weren't looking tough enough)

picture #2 (again unacceptable because i wasn't being tough)

picture #3 (camera takes a dive)

picture #4 the one the diet coke stealing lady took (!!!!!)

picture #5 all of us looking suitably tough (i like the smiley ones better, though)

we hot docs'ed it largetime tonight. we saw two, back to back. first, i had dinnie with my friend k from work. we went to mcdonald's. i had my usual (big mac combo) but switched up the chaser because i saw they had a new chicken sandwich and i thought to myself, "life is all about change, let's give it a go!" it was a terrible mistake (i still ate it, but i should have gone with the filet-o-fish). they serve it on a "ciabatta" type bun (read: square-shaped, but underbaked and tasteless), and it's a heavily seasoned breaded chicken filet (okay taste, i guess) with lettuce, tomato, and a meagre swish of mayo. it's also kind of pricey ($4.69). so somehow i spent $11 at mcdonald's. but i was really hungry!

the first doc we saw was called "tehran has no more pomegranates." i thought i'd come out and represent seeing as how my bfffff is from iran and iran never gets any love. it's supposed to show the side of iran that we in the west never get to see (ie. the fact that it's a fully-functioning country with a major metropolis filled with the usual major metropolis type stuff - skyscrapers, serpentine knots of multi-lane highways, and a booming middle class at the expense of the poor). it was not an entirely successful film. it dragged and the filmmaker took a self-consciously wry and tongue-in-cheek tone that was overplayed at the expense of a thesis that translates to an audience not steeped in the ins and outs of iranian culture. so i didn't particularly feel like i got the joke, per se. there was also a shameless overuse of schlocky time-lapse and jittery edits and cuts for no reason. it's definitely important to have a counterpoint to the barrage of uni-dimensional depictions of iran that we get here in the west (ie. something that's NOT a dusty street demonstration of bearded men raising their fists in menacing anger), however i think the filmmaker could have made a stronger, more succinct point and lost his way a bit.

the other film we saw was called "blast!" it's actually an acronym for "balloon-borne large aperture sub-millimetre telescope" it's about a group of nasa funded canadian and american astrophysicists who build this telescope and launch it into the air with a balloon. the telescope is specially designed to measure sub-millimetre light, which (from my understanding based on the film) is a type of light particle that's easily absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere, so that's why you need the balloon, to get the telescope 30-40km in the air. it's also the type of light (i think) that can be captured through the obscuring miasma of dust particles that usually hides nascent stars and forming galaxies from view. because light takes so long to travel, we can see into the past of the beginning of the lives of galaxies that are 8 billion light years away, and from that, glean a better understanding of how the matter of our universe was formed. stuff like this blows my mind (this didn't stop me from taking a little cat nap during a boring part). when they finally get the data and map it, they come to the conclusion that there's literally hundreds and hundreds of galaxies out there. it's the romantic sublime again! (note to self: brush up on william blake this summer). i love the romantic sublime as a theoretical paradigm. the film was pretty entertaining, with only some mildly questionable forays into human interest territory (boo-hoo, one of the physicists came thisclose to missing christmas with his kids) and some dodgy musical choices (stealing the calypso theme from "commando" being one, and throwing in zephyr and his pipes of pan near the end being the other). i'd recommend this film.

in between we stopped for greg's ice cream and i was a piggy and got two scoops and now i'm grossly full and flirting dangerously with heartburn. i'm going to hit some water and a shot of pepto and hope that takes care of business.

tomorrow i'm at work all day and then i'm taking dr. rei to get a pedicure for her birthday. i'm not usually one for that kind of business but i thought it would be nice to get a foot and calf massage and have my feet looking semi-presentable before i unleash them on an unsuspecting italian populace. then i think we're going to go for dinner in kensington and then home to rest.

fin.

why are all the good love songs

written about white girls? case in point: the rolling stones' "she's a rainbow":

She comes in colors ev'rywhere;
when She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming, colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

i want to dance into the room like a refraction of light through a prism, casting a spectrum of summery colour over walls and feet. i want to dazzle. instead, my lot in life is to be a swarthy, brazen, dense, ball. like the ball in the opening sequence of "raiders of the lost ark" (more of a ginormous boulder, really), decimating everything in my path and trampling all that is good, tender, and sweetly innocent.

despite this small quibble about the shortage of rolling stones' songs that i feel can accurately be said to encapsulate my life, the combination of summery weather conditions, good food, good friends, family, and being done school is an exceptionally magical elixir. how do people live in countries without spring? what does it feel like to be bereft of that moment when the sun's rays turn from being thin and waspishly cruel to warm and full and fat and jolly? to not know the benediction of turning your face up to the sun and feeling the heat suffuse your skin? to loll around underneath the sun's rays like a fat seal on a warm rock? i feel badly for them, i do. i wouldn't give up all four seasons for anything.

i'm happily working on the italy trip stuff (and to truly approximate the degree of "happily" i entreat you to picture a big, rotund pig, snuffling around in mud for tender shoots and leaves, with its' ears flopping over its' eyes. THAT kind of "happily"). only a week to go! i can't believe it. it went from being a joke bandied about between myself and dr. rei, to this spectre in the back of my mind as i was buzzing about with work and school, to a full-fledged, real, live TRIP! upon which i'm ACTUALLY embarking! how did THAT happen?!? oh oh oh the things we'll see, the history to be steeped in, the pork to consume. is there anything better than setting off on an adventure with your favorite people in the world? i'm almost beside myself. but that's starting to verge dangerously close to "tempting the fates" territory so i'll only admit to a mild twinge of anticipation. a mosquito bite, really.

as much as i'm an avowed fan of winter, i can't help but welcome the tidings of spring and summer. sleepy days spent sprawled on big brown (the couch) lazily working my way through some pleasure reading (!!!!!) while the heat filters its way through the screen and mixes with the smells of stale, brassy, height-of-summer torpor and the keening whine of bugs and lawn movers. when the days seems to hang suspended in the density of heat-induced immobility. when you yearn for the sound of ice clinking in a glass and the feel of fresh water lapping at your feet. the sweet, deep sleep of a sun-drunk day.

i grabbed the new michael ondaatje book from the library - "divisadero" it's going to be my plane reading. i'm going to bring a non-fiction work, too. two books. that's IT! (plus my assorted guidebooks and notebooks and restaurant recommendation books). there's something about the ceylon-steeped, sepia tones of ondaatje's writing that screams summer to me, even as the heaviness of the subject matter suggests the steeliness of winter. i feel such a connection with his style of prose, more so than almost any other canadian author i've ever read. maybe he calls to my post-colonial soul? the imagery he chooses, the poetry of his descriptions, the disregard for temporal constraints and narrative conventions...i haven't read a piece of his that i haven't loved. i'm excited. it's nice to be jonesing for fiction again, after my long tryst with comic books and non-fiction.

we saw "forgetting sarah marshall" on the weekend. i love jason segel so this one is a no-brainer. i kind of like kristen bell, but i think what i REALLY love is "veronica mars." it was a touch long, but russell brand is hilarious in it, the writing is quite sweet and touching, the characters are fairly well-drawn, and the musical/puppet element helps to make it a winner (for people like me for whom jim henson embodied all that is good and noble about the world). that and mila kunis is the butteriest love interest ever. i like her more than kristen bell (i never was one for blondes). the movie loses its' focus at certain points, and some of the apatow stable have a problem with really inhabiting their roles...but overall, i quite liked it. probably more than "superbad." we saw a preview for "the pineapple express" and james franco is trying really hard to win me over with his portrayal of lovable stoners and doing really well at it. to think i thought he was all "spiderman" and "anapolis"!!!! when really he's "freaks and geeks" and "pineapple express" and hilarious skits on funny or die!

yesterday was hilarious. me and dr. rei were tooling around downtown, under the auspices of trying to find me some respectable work clothes that don't make me look like a kid in king arthur's court. invariably, it turned into a giant gab-fest where i had the opportunity to be-smirch aidan o'connor's name all over town. to wit: we were in urban outfitters buying undies. and as usual i was running my mouth off about aidan o'connor. so we're standing at the cash and i say to dr. rei:

"aidan o'connor is THE WORST"
*dr. rei continues laughing*
cashier kind of gives this knowing look and says, "i know aidan o'connor"
me: "yeah, well he has scabies"
cashier: "ummm, he's my boyfriend's BEST FRIEND"
me: "well...tell your boyfriend to watch out because he has scabies"
other cashier who's standing behind tit-face cashier and laughing: "just because you have scabies doesn't make you a bad person!"
lol!!!

so we basically wandered around queen west like the tribe of issachah and got all hot and thirsty and picked up bwong en route. then we went to my dodgeball game where i had to iron-man it and i basically turned into a giant, sweaty, puffy, tomato-head. it was very unbecoming. and i didn't play all that well, so i was le pissed at myself. then me, the dotytron, bwong and dr. rei went to harbord fish'n'chips. this of course resulted in an attempt to take a picture in front of the wu-tang mural. we tried like 10 billion times but we didn't have anything to balance the camera on (we had knapsacks, a can of coke, and a can of diet coke). one of the pictures resulted in the camera tumbling off the precarious contraption we had rigged up and landing on the ground with a troubling sound, which stressed dr. rei out. then a kind lady (or so we thought) offered to take a picture FOR US! so nice, right?! so we got all posed up (this involves giving me about 10 minutes to arrange my fingers into the "blood" gang-sign that bwong taught me how to do this weekend. if i ever go to south central, i'm screwed, because it'll take me so long to show my affiliations that i'll get capped in the meantime) and the lady takes a picture, and then goes, "okay, that's good, let's take another one" so she does. then we thank her PROFUSELY and she goes on her merry way. and we're all excited so we run up the camera to check out the pictures. ummm....THEY WERE BLURRY AS S**T. we were all aghast, to say the least. our mouths dropped open. she somehow managed to take TWO of the blurriest pictures i've ever seen! and she totally didn't fess up about it! it was one of the funniest things that's happened to us in a long time. we almost died laughing. the ones we took turned out better. when dr. rei gives me the pics i'll throw them up on here because the transition from our jerry-rigged shots to the ones that she took are so astounding. AND after she left, dr. rei's DIET COKE WENT MISSING. who does that???

okay, this post has been epic. so i'll just do a quick food rundown. the top picture is this spanish-influenced bean and pork stew thing i made in the slow cooker. it consists of beans cooked with saffron, bay leaves and smoked paprika, featuring a pork smorgasbord of: smoked pork hock, pork belly, chorizo, and blood sausage. i cribbed it from my old supervisor, who i'm realizing can cook the pants off of me. hers was much better, but this version was still pretty fly. then there's a pic of sunday breakkie. we had the usual juice, alongside challah french toast with spiced plum compote, vanilla pastry cream, and mennonite sausage. then there's a peanut butter pie. then tonight's dinnie, which was pappardelle, tossed with sauteed leeks, radicchio, toasted pine nuts, chili paste, garlic and parm. served with a caesar salad, eaten outside, because everything tastes better outside. then there's a slice of key lime pie, featuring regular limes, because juicing key limes is a fool's mission (there's no juice!).

fin.

WHOOOSH

that my friends, is the sound of all (read: most) of my cares, worries, and troubles being swept away through the magic of the interwebs at the exact same moment that i pressed "send" on the email carrying my last essay of grad school to my prof. the paper turned out pretty good in the end...i thought it was going to be absolute dogbarf, but i pulled it together and i'm actually pretty proud of it. it was looking grim for a bit (ie. before i started writing and researching - when the thought of having to produce a paper on anything related to my topic seemed like goliath to my david)...and i had resigned myself to shooting low on the "15 pages" length guideline. i was going to go for 12!!! in the end, it came in at a respectable 14 pages and i had more to say than i thought. so now i'm living the hakuna matata life.

it was kind of anticlimatic being done, actually. the other final papers for my other courses were greeted with skipping, ear-to-ear grins, and a general rush of euphoria. this just felt like business as usual. when i woke up this morning (my first morning as a real, honest-to-goodness librarian), it just felt like another saturday i would spend procrastinating from homework. BUT IT ISN'T! i'm free from homework! now all i have to focus and worry about is how sucky i am at my job! and how the deadlines are coming fast and furious! and how clients aren't returning my calls! yay!

last night we saw our first hotdocs. it was a double-screening. a short one called "virtuoso" which is about playing the theremin. the film was only 9 minutes, but about 5 minutes could have been cut. it actually made the theremin seem incredibly boring. which it isn't! and there were a lot of schlocky camera techniques and amateurish fades and the subjects were depicted as simultaneously creepy/freaky/boring, which is kind of a puzzling feat. the next feature, was called "as slow as possible". here's a synopsis from the film's website:

"On his 18th birthday, Ryan Knighton was told he would slowly go blind. It’s taken fifteen years, and as Ryan prepares to let go of his last sliver of sight, he sets out to Germany to hear one note give away to another in the notorious 639 year long organ performance of the John Cage composition, As Slow As Possible."

this was actually a lovely film. it's about loss, time, mortality, and change. the central figure (ryan) is a great, reflexive, thoughtful, and funny subject. it's about legacies and the existential quest of knowing that you've touched people and that your life means something as you move within time. about being heard. it was fantastic. after the note change, the filmmaker is talking to ryan and ryan says something along the lines of: "when i heard the note change, i could tell that something different was happening, and it was profound, but after about five minutes, i started having difficulty remembering the note that had come before it." which seemed like such an apt summation for ryan's transition from sighted to blind.

from there we went to meet up with dr. rei at one of her friend's apartment for a pre-hang before going out dancing. this gathering reiterated to me again why i hate house parties. or maybe i just hate young people? it seemed like a lot of people there were very, very young and i made a new nemesis! his name is aidan o'connor. i loathe him. he basically spent the time at the place either a) in front of the mirror, switching from his toque to various hats and staring at himself intently or b) texting people on his cell phone. it was completely obnoxious and thoroughly objectionable. i wanted to bottle both the toque and the cell phone. me and the dotytron and bwong ended up bailing on the dancing festivities. it's too bad. i think under different circumstances i would have quite liked going out dancing to that night (the music sounds promising) but the peeps left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and i knew that i wouldn't have a good time throwing my lot in with them. next time! instead, we went and got gelato and whooped it up for a bit before heading home.

today i'm doing some house cleaning, and yoga, and baking, and then maybe going for a bike ride, and then working on our italy food list. soooooooo relaxing! i love that this is what my days are now going to consist of! we're having bwong over for dinner. i'm making this spanish bean stew in the slowcooker, that has a generous amount of smoked paprika, some saffron, pork belly, chorizo, smoked pork hock and blood sausage in it. mmmmmmmmm. we're going to be having this with beans topped with romesco...and a key lime pie for dessert.

yay!

fin.

things have been a soupcon quiet round here

it's because i'm in the last, thrashing, twitching throes of this infernal degree. it feels weird to be on the cusp of being done. on the one hand, it's like every particle in my being is straining against the forces of physics to be free...i can almost feel myself trying to leap out of my own skin with the anticipation of that rush of exhilaration that's going to accompany handing in my last paper.

on the other hand, there's that little, niggling, what now? voice that's whispering just beneath the relief and joy. it's like post-partum depression or something. you spend two years of your life moving towards something and when you get there, i have no illusions about how anti-climatic it's going to feel. i think because i've been working full-time the difference in life style won't feel as great. i'll still have to go to bed a decent time during the week and wake up early. i'll still have a full day of work occupying my plate and i'll still be trying to squeeze in the stuff of life in that sliver of post-work/post-dinner time. i don't think the quarter-life crisis will be as great as when i finished undergrad. then, the gaping chasm of opportunities and the portent weight of every decision seemed so much more infinitely awful and REAL. i don't think i've changed much in the past two years, whereas from the day i set foot on campus in first year university to the day i packed up my belongings and moved home after fourth year was like living a few lifetimes.

my last paper is coming along nicely. i'm kind of liking it. just a little. it won't be my best work, but it won't be something i have to run and hide from. i'm about halfway through and that's just setting up the theory. i haven't gotten to the analysis yet.

these past few days i've been cooking by the seat of my pants. veering off the menu plan and cobbling together meals based on what we have on hand and what would require a minimum of supplementing from the grocery store to execute. last night we had beef stroganoff, with the extra ribeye that couldn't be forced into monday's steak sarnie. i simmered slices of the beef with sauteed leeks and garlic, and a tonne of cremini and white button mushrooms, sliced. deglazed with beer, added whipping cream and sour cream, and finished with salt and pepper and a liberal shower of chopped dill and parsley. i served it over extra broad egg noodles, which i love for their chubby, slippery, eggy heft. sided it with some broccoli tossed in butter.

tonight we had BLT's. it was a make your own affair. i cooked off the bacon and had mine with lettuce, tomato (natch), roasted garlic mayo, and an over-easy fried egg on toast. served it with a baby spinach salad dressed with caesar dressing and replete with chunks of avocado and a fairly fine dice of red onion.

can you believe i'm almost done? what is this summer going to look like, i wonder? can you believe i'm going to italy in T-minus 13 days?!??!?? talk about not feeling real. i want to get this paper done so that i can turn my attention to completing my italy "to-do" list.

hopefully by the next time i post...this degree will be done-zo. i wonder what this little blog is going to look like minus the library school component? although, now that i think of it, it's never really strictly been school-dependent for content anyway.

fin.

testament to the human spirit

that's me, to a T. so, one of the things that start to happen when you hang around me enough, is that gradually, little hints are dropped, that indicate my fundamental belief that i can do anything. i may not be able to do it well, but i certainly believe that i can do anything (see previous blog posts re: my ability to luge, fly planes, etc.). one time the dotytron and i were driving through the country and in between singing along to steely dan, he randomly pointed at one of those giant hay bales (the circular ones) and said offhand, "do you think you could lift that" and i immediately responded, "yeah." i didn't even bat an eye or skip a beat. it made him laugh.

on friday night, we were talking at A's house, and i mentioned that my coworker g's husband doesn't believe that i can eat three baconators (i haven't tested this theory, but i'm pretty sure i can), and is willing to pay for the baconators and throw in $10 on top if i can do it. i'm not the biggest person for bet-eating...but i mean, i just don't see what the big deal is. i would certainly feel sick after, but i think i would get tired of the taste before i puked or anything (not for nothing do i call myself "iron stomach lee"). then A started telling this story about the time he broke his shoulder or arm and how there was a trucker in the hospital emergency room, who was in there because he had eaten a bread clip by mistake while making a sandwich in the rig (the bread clip is the little square plastic jobbie that holds the twisted edges of the bread bag together). and i was all like, as if you would go to emergency for that. that's so not a big deal. and everyone was all like, "it's going to tear up your intestines or tear up your butt" but i held fast to the belief that i'm fairly certain i could pass a bread clip through my butt with minimal fuss. at which point, my friend A (my male doppelganger) turns to me and says, "you're just a little tough guy aren't you? you can eat three baconators, crap out a bread clip..." hahahaha...it's so true. i AM such a little tough guy (in my head).

in other news: my sociology prof gave me a one week extension on the paper! unasked!!! argh!!! why would he do that!!! i don't want to be writing all next week!!! i think i'll be okay, i want to have it done by friday, but if i take saturday to write, it'll still be cool. i can't believe italy is in t-minus 15 days (two weeks!) and i don't even have a working itinerary. it's kind of stressing me out, but not really, because the three little bears (dotytron, dr. rei and myself) will be having so much fun just terrorizing a different country.

tonight for dinner i made a steak sarnie with arugala, sliced tomatoes, seared, sliced ribeye, and roasted garlic mayo on toasted ace bakery roasted garlic loaf. we had it with a caesar salad. and i might have banana cake for dessert.

fin.

wowz0rz

i really dug the tunes last night and had a fantastic time dancing, but the dotytron - not so much. we have this old sort-of crew of jungle cohorts how are basically the most disgusting pig-face drunkards imaginable. like, picture the worst possible, stinky, unwashed, booze-seeping-from-your-pores disgusting boozehound with no prospects, and that's the crew. i've been against these peeps and their notorious after parties, pretty much from the get-go, when i realized they were the human equivalent of motley crue's butt-wiping sock. but there was a time, when the dotytron was swept up in the spirit of the rave and getting messy, that he would go to the afterparties and whoop it up. this set a DANGEROUS precedent. basically, the odd time we go out and cross paths with these ne'er do wells, they leave me well enough alone, because i make it VERY clear that i'm not interested in having beer spilled on me/someone spitting into my mouth/someone invading my space and talking way to close (it's almost hilarious the amount of cirque-du-soleil limbo-esque back-bending contortion i can do to move myself away from the onslaught of booze-induced close-talking)/and otherwise pandering to people who are so far gone that they're not making ANY sense. so i just go, find myself a spot, and dance. the dotytron, because he didn't set boundaries, is ACCOSTED because everyone expects him to be party-time slop-face guy. it got kind of ugly. like, wicked ugly.

i'm not going to go into *too* many details to protect the innocent (which isn't really anyone but me and the dotytron, actually), but i will say that fanu showed up wearing a brand new alice in chains t-shirt that was kind of sad and heartbreaking at the same time in that "clueless finnish immigrant" kind of way. but then i still hate his face. so it was a tough call. apparently he thinks the dotytron looks like tony hawk. lol! what a crazy finnish immigrant.

in other news, i didn't make steak sandwiches because i spent all day with h, baby deliah, friend m, and that guy...i made the t-shirt pictured at left, which in retrospect, i should have worn out last night. but it's handy to have this t-shirt on hand so that when i go out all summer, it's saves me time from yelling into some random bozo's ear as they're trying to get all up in my grill.

oh, but instead of making steak sarnies...we ate at popeye's. it was kind of a debacle, because there's a popeye's that's closer to us (in the delivery respect) but they're always a**holes and the food isn't as good. so i called my regular popeye's and he was all like, "there's one closer to you, why don't you try them first because it might be quicker." so i was like, you know what? i'm all about second chances, let's DO IT! but then the dude at s**ttier popeye's was saying that i needed a TWENTY DOLLAR MINIMUM order, which isn't true, because i've ordered from o.g. popeye's and we always get by with a $15 minimum. so i talked to the manager, and i was like, "how about instead of me buying all this extra food i'm NOT GOING TO EAT, i just make it up in tips" and he's all like, "it's the principle of the matter, blah blah blah" so i got all fed up and called o.g. popeye's, and i was at $18 and the person on the phone didn't even give me a second thought. it was all like, "your total is $18.23 ma'am, it'll be there in 45 minutes." this is how we DO. no more non-o.g. popeye's ever again!

anyway, the point of that rambling interlude is to show you that popeye's is amazing because they STILL SELL DEEP FRIED APPLE PIES. i realized this fairly recently. it's AMAZING. i haven't had a deep-fried fast food apple pie since 1992, when mcdonald's made the highly regrettable decision to switch to a baked format. it was a horrible, horrible mistake. it's nice to see that popeye's understands just how delicious a crispy, blistered, tube of apple pie filling is, and how it speaks to the very core of you.

today is a day of some small tidying, then meeting up with dr. rei to regale her with tales from last night, and then dodgeball, wings and home for the wire. i'm going to try to do a soupcon of homework before that too.

fin.

one more to go!

i finished my second-last paper at work on thursday during lunch (i CRANKED out 8 [read: 4] pages of stuff in an hour) so i only have one more to do before i'm a free free free bird with a master's degree (albeit a half-cocked one). weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

in other news: i love love love my kitchener-waterloo-guelph (and the toronto division) crew so much! it's always guaranteed fun times and a million laughs a minute a' plenty. the only thing that gets me bummed is that i don't get to see them nearly enough and it makes me cry a little in my sleep.

i totally got my a-game on this morning and i've done a crapload. i packed up all my winter clothes and re-organized the closet and got rid of 2+ garbage bags FULL of stuff i don't wear (i don't know how i manage to produce two garbage bags full of clothes i don't wear every few months...i haven't even been buying many new clothes lately) and shoes and whatnot. and i mopped the floor. i'm feeling mighty foine right about now.

i'm headed off shortly to visit my friend h and m and h's little wee bebe deliah. i think we're going to make t-shirts and do other crafty things so i'm bringing my knitting too. then tonight is fanu. i don't know what's in the air, but i'm kinda readying myself to go a little bit bucktown tonight. i'm so so hype! i think summertime always screams jungle to me and the fact that i'm nearly done school is just adding to the heady mix of crunk shimmering in the atmosphere. anyway, if you click the link and check out fanu's "digital tunes" section (lower left hand side of the screen) and listen to naphta's "soundclash 1" - that's kind of how i'm feeling right now. that "terrorist"-style bassline! the amens! the rudebwoy samples! the feel of that tune is everything i love about dancing...say what you will about jungle...but nothing captures the spirit of e'd out rhythmic exhilaration quite like it.

tonight for dinner i think i'm going to make us steak sarnies...hollowed out ace bakery roasted garlic loaf, roasted garlic mayo, arugala, sliced tomatoes, medium-rare ribeye thinly sliced. with a big ol' caesar salad and a slice of that caramel-pecan banana upside down cake for dessert.

yum!

fin.

race against the clock

by tomorrow morning i have to finish another paper, which leaves me with just one more to go before this infernal degree is a thing of the distant past. there's so much to do before then! and it's so hard to do it when the sun is calling me and there are birthdays to celebrate and socialness to conduct and a trip to italy to nail down.

i tried doing some work last night but i was pretty pooped and only got one page done (one page that through the creative use of "negative space" [read: double, and sometimes triple spacing between lines/paragraphs/headings] i've managed to transform into 2.5 pages of "material"). i think i was put off by wrasslin' with making dinner last night. the dinner ended up turning out splendidly, but it was a battle to get there.

i made a sandwich consisting of an ace bakery roasted garlic loaf, split and toasted in the oven. i then slathered it with roasted garlic mayonnaise, arugala, thinly sliced tomatoes, and a head of portobello mushrooms i had sliced thickly and quickly sauteed in a little butter with salt and pepper. topped with the lid of the loaf slathered again with roasted garlic mayo. the roasted garlic mayo almost killed me. i made it from scratch and the damned thing broke (aka didn't emulsify) THREE TIMES! three times!!! i've never had that happen to me...and i used to make 4 L pails of chili mayo all the time at bymark. it was tragic and frustrating and involved using all these various gadgets and implements (i went from hand blender, to food processor) and a lot of wasted oil and eggs. in the end though, the resulting mayo was so delicious, that i've scrapped the previous menu plans in favour of meals centring around roasted garlic mayo. blts! steak sarnies! mmmmm!!!

i sided it with a salad based loosely on the persian one dr. rei made last weekend. it's very simple and light and crunchy, though i was missing the dried mint that dr. rei added. i just seeded and chopped some tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped cucumbers, and added some diced red onion together in a bowl with salt and pepper.

i also made rice krispie treats. i've made a HUGE breakthrough in rice krispe square hegemony. MICROWAVE THE BUTTER/MARSHMALLOW MIXTURE. it's incredible! it took all of 2 minutes and everything was goopy and smooth with nary a burned piece of sugar encrusting a steel pot to be seen. magical! it's taken rice krispie square production down from a 15 minute ordeal to a 5 minute one. huzzah!

tonight is leftover night. i'm also making devilled eggs and devil's food cupcakes with brown sugar buttercream for my buddy a's birthday hoo-ha tomorrow. this weekend is busy busy. tomorrow i'm meeting a friend for sushi lunch near my work, then a's birthday hoo-ha. then on saturday i'm visiting my friend h and her babe and doing crafts and then going to a drum'n'bass party (yes, you read that right...no, we haven't time travelled back to 1999) featuring this dj named fanu. fanu is basically a jerk who sometimes makes good tunes (when they're don't devolve into noodley, indiscriminate, drum-funk wankery). i kind of seriously dislike him. because he's an idiot. he's basically what would happen if uter from the simpsons grew up and made drum'n'bass. see! annoying!

fin.

i feel shame

confession time folks: while i was procrastinating on saturday (this was during the point when i was somehow still delusional and half-heartedly convinced that i was going to sit in the basement and work on a paper all day), i noodled around on the internet. and by "noodled around" i mean "watched the oprah show on the pregnant man. on the internet. in 5 minutes segments. that took forever to load" lol! THAT my friends, is dedication to the salacious details of a pregnant man.

in other news, i've somehow convinced myself that i coined the joke: "jamaican me horny" and i find it BEYOND funny. i basically laughed myself to sleep about it last night, and these were not laughs of the "demure, inward chuckle" variety. these were side-splitting belly-achers. i think this is a sign that my synapses and psyche are at a particularly vulnerable state. by the end of today, i should have 1 more assignment in the can and another well on its way. *crosses fingers*

the dotytron got wait-listed at york u for teacher's college. it was purely a numbers game...with 6000 applicants for 700 spots. he's a little bummed about it, but the person he spoke to said his application was really strong...the people who got in had SIX HUNDRED HOURS of teaching experience and his 170+ just didn't stack up (he's on the first tier waiting list though). so it's back to the drawing board...with buffalo, and maybe moving away to london or kingston a possibility for him for a year to get this shiz done. it's completely irrational of me, but i blame the roomie, because she was being VERY jinxy and constantly saying, "i know you got it." and then i'd say, "STOP JINXING IT" but she'd PERSIST and say, "it doesn't matter, he got in." so i'm kind of peeved at her for jinxing it...because **i** would never willfully and REPEATEDLY tempt the fates, thus.

last night's dinner was courtesy of the dotytron. whole wheat penne with pancetta and cauliflower and parm. delicious! he did an amazing job because the cauliflower stayed crunchy-crisp. we also had a boring salad of romaine with tomatoes and cucumber in an indiscriminate lemon dressing.

tonight we're having pan-seared portabello mushrooms with roasted garlic and thyme mayo on a crusty bun with arugala and sliced tomatoes. probably with a caesar salad on the side.

fin.

the weekend that was

somewhat predictably, given the fact that i polished off two assignments in one day (though i can't attest to their quality), and given the fact that this past weekend in toronto was of the warm and sunshine-filled variety, perfect for lolly-gagging and strolling...i didn't do a single damned school-related thing all weekend. instead i sat outside and had people over and talked to the neighbours and watched episodes of "big love" season 1 (nicolette, i hate you!) and knit and watched people flip houses and pretended to be the kind of person in the financial position to be flipping houses. it was lovely.

on saturday night, dr. rei made us a lovely dinner and invited her new man friend over. that's the dinner pictured above. she made us rice studded with persian currant-type things and cooked with saffron and grated carrots. the thing at the top of the plate (12 o'clock) jutting up like a big brown iceberg is a piece of the crunchy bit that's formed at the bottom of the rice pot by laying down pita and oil and settling the rice down for the second cooking. i covet the crunchy stuff like nothing else, and all semblance of propriety goes out the window...i'd probably snatch the last piece of crunchy bit from the hands of the elderly with nary a moral twinge to ruffle the feathers of my insatiable greed. there was also chicken simmered in a tumeric-lashed sauce, yoghurt mixed with cucumber, and a bracingly fresh salad of cucumber, red onion, and tomato and mint. my contribution to the meal was a chocolate cake with a mascarpone frosting which i topped with candied hazelnuts. the urge to do some playing with sugar struck (although this urge was at odds with the humidity of the air) and so i skewered and dragged some hazelnuts through sugar and let them cool and harden, resulting in the sputnik-like jerry-rigging in the second picture above. i wasn't overly happy with the chocolate cake...it wasn't moist and fudgy enough for me and it was kind of plain, overall...i should have pulled out the stops more.

on sunday we played dodgeball against my boyfriend's team. those were the semi-finals. we lost, and this week we're playing for last or second-last place. we're not a last place team so i hope we hold it together. it's very frustrating playing with the team right now because it's like the whole team has forgotten how to play/think/strategize dodgeball. we've decided to disband until the fall, but my boyfriend's team is playing in the spring and they need girls so i think i'm going to continue playing with them. i just love love love playing dodgeball and i think i'm getting pretty good at it.

we had dinnie at the dotytron's parents' place. it was roast boeuf. with creamed onions, which i've never had before but promptly fell in love with. i made a caramel pecan banana upside down cake. the caramel was supposed to get all gooey and drippy, but instead, it was kind of hard and crumbly. it was a pretty serendipitous accident as the crunchiness was a nice textural counterpoint to the tender cake and swoosh of whipped cream.

tonight was leftovers for dinner...we've still got a mountain of ham and split pea soup to make our way through so i didn't want to make anything new...and now i'm working on the homework i should have been doing all weekend. ugh. sorry it's been pretty dry 'round these parts lately...i'm sure once i have more going on than school, procrastinating from school, and eating dinner things will pick up...i have some things that i want to say that i've dog-eared for the time being.

fin.

2 in the can, 3 to go!

i finished two assignments yesterday which means that 1 course is IN THE CAN! now i just have to write 2 more big essays and 1 annotated bibliography and i'll be officially DONE! the problem is the motivation factor and the fact that i'm busy, still trying to have a social life, and i'm working around someone who is in a bit of a funk. poor dotytron. it's discomfiting and unsettling to have him in this state and to feel powerless to change it. i also feel constrained by all that i have to do right now and feeling guilty that i can't be there for him.

i'm having mild anxieties around the fact that i can't do business writing to save my life. my memos require fairly extensive revision and i'm really feeling beaten down about it. apparently i have trouble understanding that our clients are EXTREMELY busy and i'm not succinct enough for their frenetic, blackberry-driven lives. i write memos that **i** would want to read. which means that i probably over-explain like a mofo, but to me, context is everything! if i'm asking a question, i want the background, the frame, all the attenuating stuff that adds meaning. maybe business writing isn't for critical thinkers?

more than a month ago i finished reading chuck klosterman's "IV: a decade of curious people and dangerous ideas." i barely even remember it now, but i remember not liking it as much as "sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs." this one was way too self-aware, and much more smug. and instead of covering a wide swath of pop culture flotsam and jetsam, instead consisted of interviews and op-ed pieces on musicians and bands that i don't care about, like the white stripes and radiohead. it definitely felt like more of a chore to get through, and it wasn't my style.

 

last night's dinner was delicious. i was feeling positively giddy at finishing an assignment over lunch at work, so i decided to go for a component-heavy meal. i bought some halibut filets, and breaded them with panko and fried them. i put these on top of some potatoes that had been parboiled, then fried up with chunks of a semi-dry spanish chorizo until they bristled with crusty-crunchy brown exterior and were creamy smooth on the inside. i roasted some asparagus and made a romesco sauce to go with. it was delicious! i over fried the chorizo a little. next time, i'll start them in the pan, get them rendering, then pull them out, fry the potatoes in the fat, add the chorizo back in, and deglaze with some apple cider or cider vinegar. that's based on a tapas we had in spain that we fell in love with. for dessert i made some granny smith apple fritters (since i already had the deep fryer going for the halibut) and served that with the bourbon toffee sauce and some vanilla ice cream. the fritters were nice. more doughnut-y than crisp on the outside, the tartness of the apples really made the fritters taste bright and zingy. i tossed some in cinnamon sugar after they came out of the fryer, and the crystalline crunch of the sugar made up for textural deficiencies in the recipe.

today is a beautiful, sunny, warmish spring day replete with chirping birds and chartreuse bulbs peeking out from the soil, reaching for sun. ...i will be spending this day inside, working on an annotated bibliography. they really didn't time this school stuff properly. i have to bake two cakes today, one for dessert tonight, and one for dessert tomorrow, and i think i'm going to take a quick jaunt out to the bank to get some money and take my bike in for a pre-season tune up.

tonight we're having dr. rei, her new man friend, and bwong over for dinner. dr. rei is cooking us a persian feast. i made a very un-persian dessert of chocolate cake with mascarpone cream and hazelnut praline on top. i'm hoping that having friends and laughter around will make the dotytron buck up a bit.

fin.

poor dotytron

this post is dedicated to you, sally hansen (new nickname...ha!). poor dotytron has had a pickle of a few weeks. not only is he waiting on tenterhooks to hear back from teacher's colleges (york and OISE), but his grandpa passed away, then he got the flu, and then the family dog had to be put down today (the end was near, but the dotytron thought he was going over to say goodbye, and it turned out that he had to be the one to take the dog to the vet and be with her when it all went down). hopefully the worst of the bad pass is behind him...cross your fingers! rip, stella...hopefully in doggy heaven you can bark at nothing all the live long day in a giant, perfectly manicured garden for trampling underfoot, you can wheeze all the people food you want off of everyone's plates, and there are plastic bags aplenty to snack on when people food gets boring.



that's a picture of the split pea and ham soup i made the other night (tuesday night's dinner). it was very very easy. i took the leftover ham bone and most of the leftover ham meat and chucked it in the slow cooker with 1lb of yellow split peas, 8 cups of water, 1 onion sauteed with some diced carrot, diced celery, garlic, and diced sweet potato. then let it sim-simmah all day and finished it with some salt and pepper. it's hearty, french canadienne stuff.

tonight's dinner was a kale, ricotta, pancetta and mozzarella pie with a side salad that was kind of spanish-influenced: romaine, baby spinach, toasted almonds, chunks of avocado, and shaved majorero cheese in a blood orange, lemon juice, and olive oil vinaigrette.

now i'm doing homework like a mofo until i get these two assignments done done done! i'm trying to impose a yarn diet on myself but i don't know if it will work. an online yarn store is having a sale, and a yarn that i've worked with before is on for almost half price and there are still some luscious, plummy colours left. i don't know if i'll be able to resist! i also made the mistake of browsing through my favorite vintage clothing sellers on ebay, which was another terrible mistake. how many breezy, loose, flowy, hippie-influenced summer dresses can a girl have? how many muumuus does it take before it becomes an unhealthy obsession? how many shrunken jackets, wide-legged trouser pants, cute flats? why is it so hard to find a nice-all purpose wide belt?

questions, questions.

fin.

tell me if this is a good idea

(i'm mostly soliciting the opinion of steph on this one. if she still reads this pathetic excuse for a blog). i've been toying with the idea of getting a digital perm this summer. i'm sick of fighting with my naturally voluminous, giant, thick, bushy hair and trying to get it to be straight, and i've noticed mad asian hotties flouncing around town with bouncy, juicy, beautiful, soft, waves and curls, and i can't help thinking that that could be ME. although, i don't know if it works on my super-thick, super-stubborn, super-coarse hair. i have the most UN-asian hair ever. i mean, just looking at that picture i can tell you that that girl probably has the straightest, glossiest, thin, shiny asian hair around. mine is the opposite of all that. anyway, i'm sick of going straight, and my adventures in hair-curling last summer had me inspired and since i have a tendency to get all hippie earth-mama (bring on the muumuus!) in the summer anyway, why not get soft curls? the contraption looks CRAZY. apparently it sends an electrical charge through the hair and it lasts for like, ever and it's awesome because asian people are the best like that. what say you? yay or nay?

in other news, tell me if i'm being a b***h about this scenario or not. so, i really really love my steel cut oats. it's like the whole oat grain that's cut into tiny pieces (instead of being steamed and rolled the way most oatmeal - instant or otherwise - is). it takes forever to cook and i like to eat it for breakfast. it bears repeating that it takes FOREVER to cook and you kind of have to babysit it. so every time i get it ready the night before (you can shave some of the cooking time off by soaking the oats in the cooking water overnight) and every time i make it, the roomie asks if i can make enough for her too. so i do. every. single. time. for the past two years she's been living here. she LOVES this stuff too, and will rhapsodize about how it's so much better than regular oatmeal, etc. then i realized, that if i didn't make it, she would never, EVER make it for herself. she just wouldn't eat it.

so i started getting a little annoyed at the fact that she would never do the work of prepping it the night before, or get up early to stir it and stuff, and i would make these exasperated comments like, "how come YOU never make ME oatmeal?!?" half-jokingly (this is obviously not THAT big of a deal...it's not like sunni and shiite over here). then she would claim that she "didn't know how" and that it was "too hard" (it's a 3:1 ratio of water to oats, and then you simmer it until it's done. seriously. that's it). so i told her how to do it a million times, but she still won't do it and will always ask me to add some for her when i make mine. anyway, the long and short of it is: i've gone on strike. i only make it for myself now. and i will continue to be on strike until such time as she makes ME a bowl of oatmeal. she knows i'm doing it. she doesn't ask me to make it anymore (i'm nothing if not a vocal and plainspoken striker) but she just doesn't eat oatmeal. so i'm on strike until such time as she makes us a bowl of oatmeal. barring that, i'm only looking out for myself in the oatmeal department. does that make me a b***h? sometimes i can't tell anymore.

don't get the wrong idea. inter-housal relations are going swimmingly. this oatmeal thing is not going to result in anyone having to find new living arrangements. but i will continue on my tireless, quiet civil disobedience crusade until my dream of having oatmeal made for me comes to fruition.

that's a pic of last night's chicken noodle soup. tasty looking, eh? if i somehow manage to avoid contracting the dotytron's flu, i will be a miracle of modern science *knocks on wood* i've basically been bathing in a sea of viral matter as our house guest precluded me from sleeping elsewhere, so i've been sharing a bed with the dotytron's snot-headache-tired form for the worst of his bout. so far, i don't think i've had the flu before *knocks on wood a billion times* this probably just means that my body doesn't give it up to any old run-of-the-mill pansy a** influenza. no sir. only the hulking, stone-cold steve austin avian bird flu for me, thanks. tonight for dinner i cribbed from the dotytron's nany and poppa and made a rigatoni in a roasted yellow pepper rose sauce. so easy! 1 onion, chopped, sauteed with garlic. roasted off 2 yellow peppers, took the charred skins off, cut them into small pieces and added that with a can of diced tomatoes to the onions and garlic. seasoned and simmered it and finished it off with a glug of cream. with a baby spinach salad with avocado and red onion on the side. delicious and nutritious. i'm shoring up the bodily reserves to fight off any potential infection waiting to colonize my stressed out body. not on my watch!

fin.

earth hour

so i got out of cooking last night. the plan was to have people come over for wine and cheese by candlelight, and then head over to el sol so i wouldn't have to cook for a bunch of people i only kinda-sorta know. we celebrated earth hour by extending it into a whole evening of picking at this charcuterie spread by candlelight and drinking wine (everyone else) and shirley temples (me). we had a giant hunk of st. andre, some majorero (spanish semi-dry), and a hunk of either manchego or zamorano. we also had two kinds of cured italian sausage, olives, my spiced nuts, some proscuitto, these olive and fig crostinis and some toasted multigrain and regular baguette slices. i also served a blood orange tart in a hazelnut crust, which features the smoothest, creamiest, blood orange curd i've ever tasted. it was divine.

all in all it was a lovely evening with some weird awkwardness that i won't describe here (hint: the awkwardness was not coming from me, but from my witnessing various people's awkwardness with each other).

i'm the midst of playing nanny mcphee right now, as the dotytron is ill with some kind of weirdly debilitating flu. i hope i don't get it! he seems to be really weak and sleeping all the time and congested, and he's having trouble sleeping and gets sudden chills and has a dull headache. he says it feels like he's been beaten up. i'm nursing him with a patented technique that consists of:
- homemade chicken noodle soup with lots of dill, parsley, root vegetables and noodles
- clean sheets
- orange juice and hot ginger-lemon tea
- apple cinnamon cold and flu ny-quil
- reduced productivity on my end
- good movies from the 80s.

we watched "indiana jones and the temple of doom" yesterday. i find this to be the weak link in the series as it basically makes BOTH chinese people AND indian people into the bad guys. however! short round is really the star of the movie and for that i'm grateful. he's such a great kid! he's plucky and brave and inventive and shows real ingenuity in tough situations. i think we might dress up as indiana jones and short round next year for halloween. the love interest BLOWS though. she's the worst. all she does is cry about breaking a nail ten billion times a second. it's so lame. and she's hella shrill.

i tried to rent "parenthood" and "sneakers" but blockbuster didn't have EITHER one. what a weak-ass video store. how do they decide what to stock? if you don't have two of the best movies of the late 80s early 90s, then what DO you have? stupid movies nobody cares about like "saw"?!? or "pirates of the caribbean"? or "forrest gump"?!? laaaaaaaaame. there's a whole generation of people out there who are missing out on some of the best movies of our time, and it's a crying shame i tells you.

through the course of writing this post i started to feel a little headachey myself. uh-oh. i hope i'm not catching what the dotytron has! hopefully it's just the after-effects of a weekend with way too little sleep and way too much pork and porcine products along with a good shot of butter-based desserts. maybe i just need a nap.

i'm going to try to finish my sociology mini-paper and take a short one before dodgeball.

fin.

stuff white people like

okay, so idiots everywhere are going apes**t for this blog, "stuff white people like". my culture theory friend in sociology hepped me to it and wanted to get into an email discussion about this curious dissection of "whiteness" as a racial signifier with its' attendant cultural associations as espoused on that blog. the blogosphere is all abuzz about it, messageboards are a-twitter anyway, i checked out a few of the entries and fired back a response to the my friend, which basically went something like this: "yeah, yeah racial semiotics, blah...my main issue is: IT'S NOT FUNNY." it's almost criminally UN-funny. on par with the criminal unfunniness of "flight of the conchords" (which is currently occupying a high-ranking position in my ongoing, epic list of "deal-breaker" cultural products).

in fact, if you did a regression analysis (i have no idea what a regression analysis is) which tracked respondent's favorable ranking of both "flight of the conchords" and the "stuff white people like" blog and then triangulated it against whether or not i loathed these people on sight, my hypothesis would be: HIGH DEGREE OF CORRELATION. it's a weird thing where i actually tend to get ANGRY when people like stuff that isn't funny. it really irks me. but it's selective. like, i find the show "friends" criminally unfunny. but! "two and a half men" doesn't register. "that's so raven" makes me hoppin' mad, but "hannah montana" doesn't merit comment. weird, eh?

if you took the 10 best entries of "stuff white people like" and pitted it against the expressive hamster (my favorite iteration remains, to this day, the "kill bill" version), i think we know who would win THAT particular internet meme battle. or that blog versus "the waldo ultimatum"? not even a question to be asked. hells, i think on my funnier days i could give that blog a run for its money. i just hate how OBVIOUS it is. i mean, does it really need to be said that white people love st. paddy's day and that most children of visible minority immigrant stock (aka me and dr. rei) loathe it and can only face the usual st. paddy's day university-pub-crawl slurry of vomit and poor decisions with an appalled incredulity.

anyway, the point is: it's not funny and i don't get why people find it funny.

in other not-funny/funny news: last night's dinner with dr. rei and bwong (aka the ham-tang clan) was VERY VERY VERY funny. the dotytron feels like he has the flu so he bowed out of the festivities. which left me, dr. rei and bwong to tear down an 10 LB HAM. we ate SO much crispy, cracklin' pig fat that we were coated in a sheen of sweet, pure, clean, lard. is there ANYTHING better than pig fat? i really don't think so. we got the ham from the mennonites, and it was the best ham ever. it was sweet, not over-salted or brined, juicy, and bristling with an inch-thick layer of fat and skin, which crackled up obligingly in the oven. it was soo good!

we had the carrot cupcakes for dessert and then proceeded to walk it out by doing our usual tour of laps around blockbuster. hilarious lines of the evening are numerous and difficult to capture, but suffice it to say, they were plentiful and spot-on.

dr. rei and i watched "the jane austen book club" which is a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE movie about a bunch of crazy, sad-sack b***hes who find the secret of love and relationships by plowing through jane austen's books. NOT MOVIES, books. jane austen books are the boringest. you only read them to get to the parts you like (ie. the hook-ups) and that's why movie adaptations are so much better. anyway, this movie featured a cast of people who were seriously damaged goods and who required a big dose of professional, medical help, but were presented as if their actions and motivations made any sense. dr. rei and i were fairly convinced that one of the character's mom's had had a stroke and needed IMMEDIATE help, but instead, her poor decisions were being passed off as a result of being a "hippie" and "smoking pot". it was crazy!!!!!!!

anyway, tonight we're supposed to have the roomie's friend's over for dinner (my preggos doppelganger and her bf) to celebrate our friend pingy being in town and being together...but it's turning into a giant CF. because another of the roomie's peripheral friends (they see each other like, 4 times a year and never talk on the phone) wanted to come over and have dinner with the visiting friend from out of town, and it was kind of foisted on me, and i'm not sure that i want to cook for 8 people who i'm friendly WITH but who aren't exactly my bosom buddies, 2 of whom (the last minute addition and her bf) i barely know at all. i'm a little irked by it cuz i find it kind of rude and an imposition. does that make me an a**hole? i would never invite two random people to a dinner hosted by someone else. AND the two new invites are like, former vegetarians, and i'm planning on making this spanish bean dish that contains: pork belly, smoked pork hock, semi-cured chorizo, and blood sausage. which she probably won't eat, which makes things even more awkward. so i'm not supposed to make something special, but she wants to come over for dinner, but what am i supposed to do as the host? and oh, did i mention that i only know these people through the roomie?!??? i might just put the kibosh on all of this and suggest we go out to eat. with the dotytron being sick and all, it seems to make the most sense. but then i have ALL this stuff for a lovely spanish meal: 2 cheeses, olives, wine from spain, the bean dish, vegetables with romesco...

anyway...we'll see. otherwise, i'm going to bang out a short sociology paper on omnivorousness. omnivorousness is the prevailing paradigm in sociology of culture for the past 20 or so years. the traditional class distinctions of upper-class people liking "highbrow" arts (like opera, and the classics) and lowbrow people liking "popular" (or mass) culture has been replaced with new lines of taste distinction being draw. so now, in this new age of class "democracy" (you can't really exclude people on the basis of land, or money anymore), status seekers have to differentiate themselves in other ways, and it's through an "omnivorous", selective, sampling from traditional "low class" cultural products. the country music scene is a good example. SOME artists are okay to like for taste-makers (like hank williams, lucinda williams, johnny cash) but people like travis tritt, can't be recuperated. so it's a highly strategic omnivorousness. my prof wrote this paper on the topic with his wife (who i took the food course with) on how gourmet food writing uses the tropes of "authenticity" and "exoticism" to recuperate various items (hand-made pasta in poor areas, the hamburger), in specific iterations, to construct a privileged, omnivorous palate. i'm basing my paper on that and some of the things that came up in class discussion.

i'm also going to try to chip away at my paper for the advocacy class.

fin.

carry on my wayward son

yesterday's was the dotytron's grandpa's service. the dotytron read a short poem he selected (he did quite well, considering he was asked to read only the day before the service)...i thought the poem was absolutely lovely, and very much encapsulated our feelings about grandpa's passing:

Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
What is death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost
One brief moment and all will be as it was before
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
-Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul's Cathedral

isn't that nice? the minister was a pretty decent chap and conducted himself as well as could be expected, considering he didn't know grandpa (i don't think). he made this weird digression where he seguewayed from the dotytron’s speech into this story he wanted to tell, but tried to make it sound like a seamless transition. it kind of went like this: “thank you, dotytron. that reminds me of a story...” then he sauntered over to where the dotytron’s young second cousins (his mom’s niece’s kids. is that second cousin?) were (they’re around 4 or 5) and started telling them this long, rambling story that his minister had told him, about this water bug that was living at the bottom of the lake, and then saw light glimmering on the surface, and swam up to the surface of the lake where the water was born, and then hung out there for a bit, and then one day broke free and became a dragonfly. (!!!!!). at this point, i was already having a small case of the giggles because of the weird segueway, but when he talked about the water bug turning into a dragonfly, me and the dotytron gave each other the sidelong, wtf? looks, because um, that’s not biologically possible. waterbugs are waterbugs and dragonflies are dragonflies. i also just paraphrased like a mofo, because no word of a lie, the minister’s story lasted for like, 20 minutes. it was just too strange a metaphorical leap to take to adequately express his point for the kids (basically, that the waterbugs left behind were happy at the transformation of their buddy into something that could fly and was beautiful). all i could picture was my niece. if someone had come up to here and tried to tell her a story for 20 minutes that was that narratively obscure, i could totally picture the look of skepticism on her features.

all in all, it was a lovely service. it’s hard though. even as you’re welling up, you’re trying to constantly tamp down the rising flood of tears because it’s a CELEBRATION.OF.LIFE. and you keep repeating that to yourself like it’s a mantra, even as you’re bawling your eyes out. it’s nice to have everyone together sharing in memories and fond thoughts and eulogizing someone. i kinda wish that funerals could happen when people were still alive…if you know what i mean, because i think it’s so nice to commemorate someone, and it’s sad that it only happens when they’re gone and can’t have all their loved ones and old friends together in one room, telling them what they’ve meant over the years.

i still think my funeral should be fun. i want it to be a rollicking good time, with funny sketches, and speeches, and youtube video clips, and kansas and journey and gangstarr playing. i want there to be a barbecue buffet, with popeye’s fried chicken, big macs, and filet-o-fishes, lots of cupcakes, and pies. hopefully hologram technology will have progressed to the point where my 3-D talking likeness can be displayed and i can “participate” (like princess leia in star wars) and crack jokes.

there were oodles and oodles of old people at the funeral. the extent to which i get along with old people is mind-boggling. they love me! i’m the hit of the party! i think it’s because we share the same values. old people and i generally see eye-to-eye on: fiscal conservatism, the value of a work ethnic, pension security, shaking our heads and clucking our tongues at the antics of young people, a return to no-nonsense common sense, and handicrafts like cooking, baking, quilting, knitting, and building things with an honest day’s sweat and toil.

tonight i’m having the bwong and dr. rei over for dinner. then we’re going to get together with our friend from out of town, pingy and the roomie, once they get kicked out of my female doppelganger’s house (the female doppelganger is even MORE house-bound than i, and has a 10pm festivity-threshold – after that, you get the boot).

we’re having a southern americana meal. a giant baked ham, glazed with ginger-pear jam. either biscuits or scalloped potatoes or some kind of smothered potato gratin. braised cabbage with bacon and apples or green beans with bacon. carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for dessert.

fin.

freedom to procrastinate

the ides of spring are in the air (i have no idea what the "ides" of anything are supposed to be, but i vaguely recall that "ides" are generally paired with spring-like things like the month of may). am i right? anyway, the mysterious ides are conspiring to have me NOT doing a lick of work. other things that are in collusion with the mysterious ides are: easter weekend, the service for grandpa reid tomorrow, a visit from the dotytron's friend last night, a visit from the roomie's friend from long island this whole week, my desire to have a life and cook and eat and lead a life of decadent leisure.

i had a meeting with the husband half of the prof that i'm doing the r.a. work for, and he gave me a VERY open deadline (end of may!!!) for my research, which is helping to take a load off, considerably. i'm only marginally chipping away at my work load though and i can feel the drive towards productivity slipping through my fingers. this is a recurring theme on this here blog, and i can well understand my waning readership's boredom with it.

anyway, the work i'm doing for them is compiling a body of research on the how the term foodie is employed, contested, etc. my final paper for the course is going to fold up the research i'm doing and be another one of my solipsistic, self-indulgent attempts to capture myself in writing: in particular, my own uneasiness with the term "foodie" and how i hate self-identifying as one, even as i exhibit all the textbook hallmarks of someone of that ilk.

another paper i want to write talks about the discourse of authenticity that's continually invoked when popular media discusses "the wire" [note that i've reverted back to quotations for titles...it's a lot easier from a formatting perspective]. this is evident even in so far as there's that popular rumour circulating that when the show is broadcast all the police radios in the baltimore area go quiet because all the drug dealers and police are busy watching the show (or something to that effect). fans of "the wire" continually reiterate it's authenticity in discussions as a sign of its legitimacy as a cultural product. to which you kind of have to invariably respond: "how the f**k do you know?" which is when they generally revert to the example of the police radios going quiet. i don't know why a show like "the wire" has to be authentic. but i think there's a general trend towards recuperating this show for a liberal, privileged audience by appealing to its' authenticity (which tends to be how most high-status cultural hallmarks of distinction are justified for the consumption of a cultural and economic elite).

i'd like to write that this summer. but my list of things to do this spring/summer is growing exponentially. to wit:

- get my G1 driver's license
- take an advanced CPR course
- take a bike mechanics course
- take a defensive bike riding course
- tear the house apart and do a MASSIVE spring cleaning, get rid of tonnes of s**t and reorganize what i'm keeping
- start quilting
- continue knitting
- go back to the farmer's markets
- spruce up the house and buy the odds and sods "house things" that we need
- organize all my old photos
- sell a bunch of my vinyl
- eat outside and hang out
- go spend at least a weekend with my sis
- try new restaurants
- go back to old ones (harbord fish and chips, i'm looking at YOU)
- go bike riding with friends
- start running again
- regularl yoga classes
- dodgeball training
- explore the city for food purveyors
- cottage vacations with my family and the dotytron's family
- pack away all my winter clothes
- short film festival
- hot docs
- lobster-fest version 2.0
- a & j's wedding
- start paying off my osap
- save a tonne of coin

eep! that's pretty ambitious. we'll see how much i get done.

last night's dinner was grilled eggplant (sliced thin and pressed on the panini press), smeared with a ricotta basil mixture, rolled up, and baked in the oven with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. the eggplant was bitter which wasn't nice. maybe next time i'll bread it and fry it instead. we had that with garlic bread (my award-winning recipe) and a salad of romaine and cucumber in a balsamic vinaigrette.

on monday, i made a white bean, rosemary and roasted garlic soup. i served this with a quick, chicken-liver spread that i made on crostinis (i LOVE LOVE LOVE chicken liver spread!), and a roasted beet and baby spinach salad with horseradish and a quick lemon vinaigrette, with some tournevant de nature goat's chese (quebec cheese, mild, with a creamy, not chalky, texture. divine).

tonight i'm eating leftovers as we have quite a backlog to slog through.

fin.